‘I get it,’ he said, breathing hard. His face was flushed and I glimpsed a much older, fleshier Jason waiting in his future – overweight and slack. He leaned back a little, unsteadily, then forward, trying to bring his head to the right distance to focus on the point where the pulse beat in my neck. ‘I get it. You’ve suddenly, out of the blue, started being a bitch.’ He put his foot in the door and leaned into the room, his face close to mine. ‘I’ve been so fucking patient with you. Haven’t I? Even though part of me’s like, “Jason, you fucking asshole, why’re you wasting your time with that little nutjob?” And all I’ve done is be patient. And what do I get in return? You. Being way, way weird with me.’
‘Well, that,’ I said rigidly, ‘must be a direct result… of me… being a weirdo.’
He opened his mouth, then closed it. ‘What’s that? A joke?’
‘No. Not a joke.’ I reached out to slide the door closed. ‘Goodnight.’
‘You bitch,’ he said, in quiet awe. ‘You fucking little-’
I opened the door a few inches and hurtled it back along the rails towards his foot, making him jump back.
‘ Fuck! ’ he shouted. I closed the door and locked it. ‘That does it, you asshole.’ He kicked the door. ‘Shitty little retard.’ I could hear him faltering in the corridor, not certain what to do with his frustration. I expected him to boot the door down. Or to run at it with both fists out. I lit a cigarette and sat among my books, my fingers pressed to my head, and waited until I heard him give up.
He kicked the door once more, a parting shot: ‘You’ve just made a big mistake, shithead. The biggest mistake of your life. You’ll regret this till the day you die.’
Then I heard him stumbling back to his room, muttering to himself, thumping the shutters on the landing as he went.
When he’d gone, and the house was quiet, I sat still for some time. I smoked one cigarette after another, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs, calming myself. At last, when almost half an hour had gone by and I’d calmed down, I got up.
I flattened a piece of paper on the floor and got out my jar of paintbrushes. I sat for a while, surrounded by my books and paints, my hands resting on my ankles, staring up at Mickey Rourke’s light. I was trying to imagine, really imagine, what it would be like to eat another human being. At university I’d been expected to read so much, about so many unimportant things: years of rubbish were lying around in my head. I had to concentrate very, very hard to remember the things I needed now.
After a while I put out my cigarette and mixed together a little yellow ochre, some rose madder and zinc white. I went quickly, letting the paint ridge and pool where it wanted. There was one reason you might eat another human, I thought, one good reason. A face flowed out of the end of my paintbrush, gaunt cheeks, neck like a stalk; below it, the shadowed rack of ribs, a tapering bone of a hand resting on the frozen ground. A starving man.
I understood about starvation. It is one of those cold shadows, like disease, that trail round the globe in the footsteps of war. There had been two great famines in Stalin’s years: hundreds of Russians had had to survive by eating human flesh. At university I’d been to the inaugural lecture of a professor who’d got into the St Petersburg city archives and found evidence that Leningraders in the great Second World War siege had eaten their dead. I dripped on to the paper a long, dry shinbone, the foot growing on the end like an awkward fruit. You’d have to be so hungry, so desperate, to eat another human being. Other uneasy names were coming into my head: the Donner pass, the John Franklin expedition, the Nottingham Galley, the Medusa, the Old Christians’ rugby team in the Andes. And what did the Chinese mean when they said Yi zi er shi: ‘We are hungry enough to eat each other’s children’?
I painted the kanji for it.
Hunger.
I lit another cigarette and scratched my head. You can’t imagine what you might do if you were starving. But there was more: human beings cannibalize for other reasons. I switched to a calligraphy brush and wetted the pine soot tablet. I loaded the brush with ink and slowly, slowly drew out a single kanji: a little like the character for number nine, but with a backward flick to its tail.
Power.
There had been a research student at university who had been crazy about warlike sects in Africa – I remembered him fly-postering the university for a lecture on the Human Leopard Societies of Sierra Leone, and the Liberian Poro child soldiers. I didn’t go to the lecture, but I’d overheard people talking about it afterwards: ‘ Believe me, what he was saying was as freaky as ’parently they cut up their enemies and eat them. If it’s someone they’ve defeated it’s supposed to make them stronger.’ Some of the Nanking testimonies recalled corpses on the street with hearts and livers missing. The whispers were that they’d been taken by the Japanese soldiers. To make them more potent in combat.
I looked at the symbol for ‘power’, then refilled my brush and under it drew out two more characters: ‘Chinese’ and ‘method’. Kampo. Chinese medicine.
Healing.
What did I remember from the reading I’d done? I pulled out all the books from Kinokuniya and sat, some of them cracked open over my knee, some resting on top of the paintings. I kept one finger holding a place in one book while I leafed through another, the paintbrush between my teeth. Mickey Rourke’s gold light shone in squares on the tatami.
It was amazing. It was all there. I’d been reading it for weeks, over and over again, and I still hadn’t seen it. But now, with my new eyes, I was seeing it all. First I found Miao-chuang, eating his daughter’s eyes and hands. Why? To cure himself. Then I found, in the translation of a sixteenth-century medical compendium, the Ben Cao Gang Mu, treatments made from thirty-five different human body parts. Bread soaked in human blood for pneumonia and impotence, human bile dripped into alcohol and used to treat rheumatism. The flesh of executed criminals to treat eating disorders. There were Lu Xun’s outrageous tales of human meat eaten in Wolf Cub Village, and his genuine account of his friend Xu Xilin’s liver and heart being eaten by En Ming’s bodyguards. In a textbook about the Cultural Revolution there was a long description of the outdated tradition of ko ku – the pinnacle of filial piety, the act of boiling a piece of one’s flesh into soup to rescue a beloved parent from sickness.
I picked up the three sheets of kanji – hunger, power, healing – went to the wall, pinned them on to the Tokyo skyline and looked at them thoughtfully. Japan ’s history was all coiled around China ’s: so many things had been transferred, why not this? If human flesh could be a medicine in China, then why not here in Japan? I returned to my textbooks. There had been something. I had a vague, vague recollection of something… Something I’d read in a module at university.
I pulled out a study of post-war Japan. Somewhere in it were transcripts of the Tokyo war trials. I quickly lit a cigarette, sat down cross-legged on the floor and leafed through it. I found what I was looking for two-thirds of the way through: the testimony of a young Japanese woman employed during the war by the notorious 731 unit. I sat there in the dim light, my hands and feet suddenly terribly cold, and read the chapter: ‘Dubbed “maruta” (logs), allied servicemen POWs were subjected to vivisection and human experimentation.’
There was a picture of the assistant who had given evidence. She was young, pretty, and I could imagine the chill and absolute silence in the great military training auditorium, no one in the court moving – or even breathing – as she described in a small, clear voice the day she had eaten the liver of an American serviceman. ‘ For my health.’
I sat there for a long time, staring at the picture of this beautiful young cannibal. In 1944 at least one person in Japan had thought that cannibalism could help their health. It was time to take Fuyuki much more seriously than I ever could have imagined.